page_title: Monomachus Crown
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Monomachus Crown / History
caption_attribution_description: English: So-called Crown of Konstantinos IX Monomakhos, National Museum of Hungary, Budapest
context_page_description: The Monomachus Crown is a piece of engraved Byzantine goldwork, decorated with cloisonné enamel, in the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest, Hungary. It consists of seven gold plates depicting Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX Monomachus, his wife Zoe, her sister Theodora, two dancers and two allegorical figures. The piece has puzzling aspects that have long made it the subject of scholarly debate; it was probably made in Constantinople in 1042.
  It was unearthed in 1860 by a farmer in what is now called Ivanka pri Nitre in Slovakia, then Nyitraivánka in Hungary. If it is a crown, it is, with the Holy Crown of Hungary of a few decades later and the kamelaukion of Constance of Aragon, one of only three surviving Byzantine crowns.
context_section_description: In 1860 a farmer near Nyitraivánka discovered the treasure while plowing. The objects passed to a member of the local landowning nobility, who sold them in four transactions to the Hungarian National Museum between 1861 and 1870, the last sale posthumously via a dealer named Markovits.  Also sold were the two smaller cloisonee medallions found with the crown plaques, with busts of the apostles Peter and Andrew. These medallions lack holes for nails, unlike the gold plates. In the view of Magda von Bárány-Oberschall and most scholars they almost certainly do not belong to the Monomachus Crown.
  The general assumption was for long that the crown "seems almost certainly to be a female crown and was presumably a gift to the wife of a Hungarian king", or to the king himself. In 1045 the Hungarian King Andrew I married Anastasia of Kiev, a daughter of Grand Prince Yaroslav the Wise, whose brother Vsevolod I had been married to Irene (Maria), a daughter of Constantine IX since 1046.
  According to the traditional account, Andrew or his queen would have received the crown from Constantine IX at this juncture. He was in need of a new crown, since Henry III had captured the original crown (supposedly donated to king Stephen I by Pope Silvester II in 1000) from King Samuel Aba in 1045 after the Battle of Ménfő and had sent it back to Rome.  According to popular legend this was the Holy Crown of Hungary, or some version of it, though it seems unlikely that any elements of the present crown are that old. The fact that Andrew, who had taken power near the end of September 1046, was first able to be crowned in February 1047 could by attributed to the need for a royal embassy to travel from Hungary to Constantinople and back in winter in order to bring the Monomachus crown to Hungary. In 1057 the young King Solomon was also crowned with this crown.  Other, very different, possibilities have been suggested and are covered below.
  In 1057 Solomon was besieged by Geza I and escaped with the crown and treasure in the direction of Pozsony in order to seek the protection of his brother-in-law Emperor Henry IV. Soldiers of Geza apprehended him as he was fording the Váh near Ivanka pri Nitre. Solomon had the treasure and the crown buried and barricaded himself behind the walls of Pozsony. When Henry IV launched an expedition in September 1074 to restore Solomon to the Hungarian throne, the army of the Emperor abandoned him and rode along the Valley of the Váh in the direction of Nitra and Šintava. Possibly this was a futile attempt to recover the buried crown near the ford of Ivanka pri Nitre.
caption: The central panel, depicting Constantine IX Monomachus
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